Dragging their feet like zombies, they walked up the hill to the big tent. Paul Landers and Russ Steele were bent over the map with three other men whom Sandy had not seen before.
Russ Steele looked up as the boys entered the tent. He indicated the three strangers. “Fellows, I’d like you to meet Paul Ames, Bill Lukas and Tom Fenning. They’ve come down from Canada to help us fight this fire. And brought their own crews with them.”
“Just in time, too,” Landers said gratefully. “If only I had been able to send in a fresh crew this morning, we might have been able to avert this new flare-up. Those poor devils had been working for seventeen hours without letup; they just didn’t have anything left.”
Sandy leaned over the map. “How did it happen?”
Russ ran his finger along a red line running out from the north end of the ridge. “It jumped the emergency line you boys helped to build last night. Shortly after noon that southwest wind picked up again and there wasn’t any stopping her this time. It happened so fast, a half dozen of the men were severely burned.”
Sandy could see that the fire was already advancing on a narrow front past the end of the ridge.
“The fact is, it’s really a brand-new fire,” one of the Canadians said.
“Exactly,” Fire Boss Landers agreed. He drew a circle around the burned-out area southwest of the ridge. “We’ve got it licked in this sector.”
The Canadian studied the map with intense concentration. “As I understand it, this region north of the ridge is rocky and not too heavily forested.” He touched his index finger to a small oval representing a hill. “Any vegetation growing on this hill?”
Landers shook his head. “Scrub and grass. The same as on the ridge.”